Sub Rosa #1

On every weekday I arrived
at the reading room on 5th Avenue,
12:45 pm sharp

The exactitude will do, stated
the lost Brotherhood of Amman,
their archaic view still consisting of
78! ways to arrange the life

All this took place in the Medieval times,
that much I learnt from the books;
one way was the Lovers

Alienated by the plurality of the present,
foretelling has gone, discarded
To paraphrase: the waiting of afternoon

Berlin #2

The yellow light burns
the colors off of your lips,
the railway station, a vertigo
at the foot of our secular steeple

I envelope your grin,
the negative marching orders
back into their skin

Pictures of your head
in prolongated positions,
your hair on the rack, attached
underneath the lengthened fingernails,
in the extended darkness,
on the catwalks whence
I bought you that dress

Berlin #1

I thought I’d be more arrogant here,
my eyes on the Autobahn,
its foreign miles, the contracts I believe
each foreigner knows

The light squeezing through
the lay light, it’s meant
only for the other lights,
museum airports, the speed
and the finales I’m so envious about

The junctions my hood has passed
have forged me this Purgatory,
a pier, a dark moment where
I no longer see the expressions
on your face

Interlude

Frank Sinatra—Frankie,
the Chairman? Yeah,

Ol’ Blue Eyes, he starred
in that one movie
and sung about the city

Elsewhere Samuel L. Jackson went blind

played the piano
big
bad
black
motherfucker

Bestiary (On Sullivan Street) #2

Reed, grass, ponderous
whale bones, corsets, shafts,
ravines, drowned suicides, sexes,
reefs and sexless lust

From blue to red
I embrace the spectrum, believing
on the flatness of the life
or that I’m
the first skeptic

The skies bear their brunt,
the dark mass that turns
off the lights, the record around

The needle searches and finds, I
invent a myth more

Syzygy

My bedroom turns cold, the screen,
the cloudless sky and the
constellations stay here
to keep me company

Smoking a cigarette on the balcony,
watching the cathedral, the Latin inscriptions
of the unknown and the unconscious
people passing it by

Life is all about thinking
in foreign languages and keeping
your plants alive